National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries
National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries is the first exhibition of its type in Australia, drawn from the collections of all the State Libraries and the National Library. The items selected are inevitably just a tiny sample of the libraries’ great holdings. Their organisation is thematic, illuminating eight key strands in Australian history.
While books are the objects most associated with libraries, this exhibition includes only a handful of them. The earliest is Francisco Pelsaert’s Ongeluckige Voyagie from 1647, an account of the shipwreck of the /Batavia/. The rarest is the 1806 edition of John Lewin’s Birds of New Holland with their Natural History.
Manuscripts - by definition much rarer if not unique objects-occupy much more of the exhibition. Many have been chosen because of the celebrity of their authors, ranging from James Cook to Nellie Melba to Lindy Chamberlain. Some have also been selected for their unusual form, such as the diary of Ray Stewart, a POW in Germany during World War II, written on a roll of toilet paper. Others have been chosen because of their remarkable content, such as the ‘must be a hoax’ telegram from a private detective working on Australia’s most celebrated literary fraud, the Ern Malley case.
Drawings, watercolours and prints, primarily from the late 18th and the 19th centuries, also loom large. Such art works are one of the great strengths of the libraries’ collections, typically eclipsing those of Australia’s art galleries. Most are by settler artists of natural history subjects, landscapes and portraits of the famous and infamous. But the exhibition also includes drawings by several Indigenous artists.
Photographs are another key ingredient, reflecting the rich holdings of Australian libraries, which again are much larger than those of Australia’s art galleries. The earliest are portraits of Palawa, Tasmanian Aborigines, taken by Bishop Nixon just a few months before he lent his works by Turner to the Art-Treasures Exhibition in Hobart in 1858. The most recent are by Damian McDonald of the Baxter Immigration Reception and Processing Centre near Port Augusta, taken in 2002.
The exhibition is particularly strong in its display of objects, exemplifying how libraries are, in effect, also historical museums. The exhibits include games, menus, labels, medals, leg-irons, death masks, scrimshaw, records, clothing, food, bedding, sporting equipment, flags, a carpet, a torch, a globe, a compass, a gun, a whip and a suitcase. They range from the one surviving complete convict uniform to an early patchwork quilt made by Aboriginal people in Western Australia, and the cricket bat used by Don Bradman when he scored a world test record of 334 runs against England in 1930.
